From chaos comes art

David Bonetti, EXAMINER ART CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Monday, August 24, 1998

PROFESSIONALLY, this is an exciting time for Hung Liu. The Chinese-born artist has lived in the Bay Area since 1990, after surviving the chaotic forces of the Cultural Revolution that swept through her homeland while she was a young adult. Just now, she is enjoying a 10-year retrospective of her painting that is currently touring six small museums from LaJolla to Brunswick, Maine. And an exhibition of new paintings, called "Chinese Types" and opening Sept. 3, will be her fourth one-person show at the Rena Bransten Gallery since 1991.

Since she immigrated to the United States in 1984 to enter graduate school at UC-San Diego, Liu's painting has been based on photographs. Much of the new work comes from photographs by the Scotsman John Thomson, who traveled through Asia in the late 19th century taking pictures. His Chinese subjects appeared in a book titled "Through China With a Camera."

"In his writing, Thomson used the term "Chinese types.' That's not a term we would use today. I wanted to explore what he meant," Liu says.

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Some of the paintings Liu based on Thomson's work are profiles of women of different classes. "I liked them because they are of people not returning the gaze," she says. "It's like what Barbara Kruger says, "Your gaze hits the side of my face.' Also, making them so large makes them something else."

In her earlier work, Liu dealt with subjects who were consciously returning the photographer's - and, implicitly, the viewer's - gaze, a big subject in postmodernist, feminist theory.

"I painted pictures based on photographs taken in a studio, pictures of prostitutes with artificial studio arrangements. They were women for sale, on the market, who returned the viewer's gaze like Olympia, like images from classical European painting. Then I painted figures from the Imperial court - dowagers, the empress herself, consorts, eunuchs, all from photographs, all posed. Now, I am interested in anonymous people caught up in events."

Liu has painted several times an image of a women and her daughter pulling a boat up a river by long, thick ropes, because they are archetypal images of labor and they have a universal quality. "You don't know who they are. They could be Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai. All you know is that they're struggling - to get someplace, to survive."

Liu knows what it's like to struggle to survive. Born in 1948 in the midst of the Communist Revolution, she was separated as an infant from her father, a captain in Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist army, until 1994. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, she was sent to the countryside for re-education, where she worked in the fields seven days a week for four years. A project about her high school class is now absorbing her artistic energies.

"I went to Beijing just last month for my high school reunion," she recounts. "The Cultural Revolution started in 1966, and my classmates and I were graduating that year to go to college. I went to a girl's boarding school; all my classmates were women. They've been having reunions for several years - they found each other. When one of them came to the U.S. on business, she contacted me, and when she told me about the reunions, I said, "I'm going to China.'

"I saw a bunch of women - we're all turning 50 this year - for the first time in 32 years.

"Some of my classmates were Red Guards. They beat the teachers. At the reunion, one of them whispered to me, "We were victims too. We were only 18.'

"I am amazed by the degree of forgiveness. Among my classmates, we are way beyond revenge. There was one person in the class no one wanted to come. She's from a high government family, and she was pretty ruthless. But another woman, who was very radical, who psychologically punched out everyone, begged to come to the reunion. She is still big in the party, but she was just one of us at the reunion.

"I want to make a book about my classmates, "Class of '66' - we didn't have a yearbook. It will be about women in China, what they went through. I am going back to China in August. I asked everyone for a photograph from 32 years ago and one from now and a photograph if there's a child, and a resume - just the facts. "I was sent to the countryside in 1968, worked in the fields for two years,' whatever.

"It was as if someone had dropped a bomb on us and then we came back together 32 years later: "And what happened to you?' " &lt;